China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) on Wednesday last week said it would “use legal means to punish die-hard Taiwanese independence separatists.” The TAO’s latest list of expanded “Taiwanese independence separatist” targets include former premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌), former legislative speaker You Si-kun (游錫?), National Security Council (NSC) Secretary-General Joseph Wu (吳釗燮), Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴), Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄), Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators Tsai Chi-chang (蔡其昌), Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) and Wang Ting-yu (王定宇), NSC Deputy Secretary-General Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) and Government Watch Alliance spokesperson Chen Jiau-hua (陳椒華). Nearly all of those listed are members of the DPP.
Are there truly only 10 “die-hard Taiwanese separatists?” That number is far too low. Are they truly the most prominent “separatists”? How was this list cooked up exactly? Were the listees chosen based on their age, experience, speeches or actions? However much we look into the matter, the connections seem absent.
The earliest designation was Wu on May 20, 2021. TAO spokesperson Zhu Fenglian (朱鳳蓮) announced his inclusion on the list, stating that China would take every measure necessary to severely punish him and he would be held accountable for the rest of his life.
Later that same day, Zhu added Su and You. On Aug. 16, 2022, Hsiao, Koo, Tsai, Ker, Lin, Chen and Wang were also listed.
The most bizarre mention was Chen. She is former former chairwoman of the New Power Party and a conservationist. She is said to have been put on China’s “sanctions” list due to her opposition to importing books and other written materials published in China, but there is no clear-cut evidence for why she was included.
Although Wang’s name is at the bottom of the list, China’s Taiwan-facing government strata have long held a grudge against him. This is apparent in Beijing’s alleged contracting of gangsters to kidnap and assault him in 2008 when he was a Tainan City councilor after protestors jostled Beijing-run Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits Vice Chairman Zhang Mingqing (張銘清) while Zhang was touring the city.
The TAO now provides an e-mail address for people to report “crimes” and provide evidence against Taiwanese independence advocates. However, the TAO purposefully listed nine of the 10 by name. Chen was no doubt included just to round out the number. When China’s economic opening-up policy was first introduced in the 1980s it was criticized as being just the “will of the officialdom.”
It was also the “will of the officialdom” which brought the policy to an end.
The return of this governance method should not come as a surprise, as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the Chinese state itself and cannot be outwardly criticized.
The decision to list these 10 supposed “separatists” as “die-hards,” who seem to lack public support, is at the end of the day a decision made by the head of the TAO as a means of repaying back Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) benevolence. Where is there even an iota of real legal concepts in this latest episode of Chinese lawfare?
Using reporting and exposition to instigate a civil circular firing squad is based on the concept of “employing barbarians to fight off barbarians.” It is the CCP’s most successful tactic for annexing and weaving others into its web.
After Hong Kong’s “second handover,” the CCP and its proxies in Hong Kong encouraged Hong Kongers to report on one another. The city’s official data show that since China’s national security reporting hotline was set up in Novemeber 2022, there have been more than 750,000 reports made up until the end of June. There were about 50,000 in the past four months alone. Only one or two of the reports even went to trial. In other words, the vast majority of the reports are completely bogus.
Fifty thousand in just four months — an average of about 400 daily reports. How much time and effort is wasted by this charade? No wonder China’s internal security costs keep skyrocketing every year. Taiwan has nearly three times the population of Hong Kong. If China annexed Taiwan, would the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) jump to help China handle such reporting? If it declined, China would surely do it itself. That would certainly help China puff up its employment numbers.
Speaking of reporting, would I have to report myself? Surely, I would have piles of previous convictions, having made many public statements over my life in support of Taiwanese independence. I was even listed more than once in the Hong Kong Times. One could go out on a limb and say my record of outspokenness makes me a criminal mastermind.
The head of the TAO ought to list me as wanted globally. In doing so, with a single action they could raise my profile worldwide, erasing my 10 years of writer’s obscurity then pass their judgment on me. I would not have to resemble some insidious people who appear to not even be alive.
Paul Lin is a Taipei-based political commentator.
Translated by Tim Smith
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